[radarsat1]

This is interesting because I've been considering a similar project. I maintain a package for a scientific simulation codebase, it's all in Fortran and C++ with too much template code, which takes ages to build and is very error prone, and frankly a pain to maintain with its monstrous CMake spaghetti build system. Furthermore the whole thing would benefit with a rewrite around GPU-based execution, and generally a better separation between the API for specifying the simulation and the execution engine. So I've been thinking of rewriting it in Jax and did an initial experiment to port a few of the main classes to Python using Gemini. It did a fairly good job. I want to continue with it, but I'm also a bit hesitant because this is software that the upstream developers have been working on for 20+ years. The idea of just saying to them "hey look I rewrote this with AI and it's way better now" is not something I would do without giving myself pause for thought. In this case it's not about the license, they already use a permissive one, but just the general principle of suggesting a "replacement" for their work.. if I was doing it by hand it might be different, I don't know, they might appreciate that more, but I have no interest in spending that much time on it. Probably what I will do is just present the PoC and ask if they think it's worth attempting to auto-convert everything, they might be open to it. But yeah, the possibilities of auto-transpiling huge amounts of software for modernization purposes is a really interesting application of AI, amazing to think of all the possibilities. But I'm happy to have read the article because I certainly didn't think about the copyright implications.

[duskdozer]

If you really want to do that, the sensible thing is to keep it separate from the original and respect the original license. There would have been no outcry if that happened with chardet. If the different package is genuinely better, it will be used.